A Guide To Richmond, VA, By a Guy Who Lived There from '93 to '97

Thanks to the
college basketball championships, in which both Richmond,
Virginia-based teams (Virginia Commonwealth University and the
University of Richmond) performed admirably,
we had cause to ponder, “Not sure why people are so into
Richmond, Virginia.” That’s a reasonable question! Richmond is a
mostly busted-ass city on the banks of the James River that’s
played host to such luminaries as George Allen, and also George
Allen’s wife—what’s her name, the one who married George Allen.
It’s best known as the capital of the Confederacy, and, as many of
the old-school Richmondites—by which I mean the “racist” ones—will
probably tell you, that’s basically where the city peaked.

But I attended Virginia Commonwealth University for just as long
as was humanly necessary, and I have to say, I have a fondness for
Richmond that just won’t quit. So I thought I’d share some fun
facts about a place I lived while I was getting an MFA that I
pretty much don’t really use anymore!

Richmond loves them some confederate heroes! And they
celebrate them all on a road called Monument Avenue. There, you’ll
find all the greats: Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J.E.B.
Stuart, Jefferson Davis. Also, there is some guy named Matthew
Fontaine Maury whose importance is a mystery to me. He did
something with sextants, I think?

Also, Arthur Ashe! Arthur Ashe was a tennis playing hero
of Richmond who won three Grand Slam titles, which was more Grand
Slams than the entire Confederate Army put together! But when it
came time to put his statue on Monument Avenue, man… people really
freaked out! A lot of people didn’t want Ashe on the Avenue
because they looked him up and saw that he was a black dude. The
whole tennis part threw them for a while, but they sussed it out
eventually. And so: racism. But a lot of otherwise nicer people
didn’t want his statue on the street because they didn’t want Ashe
associated with a bunch of Civil War losers. Whatever! That’s where
they put the statue, so everyone loses!

To be honest with you, have you seen the statue? It kind
of looks like Ashe is about to cold whoop some kids upside the head
with some books and/or his tennis racket. I always thought it
looked weird, anyway, but I never said much about it, because my
wife was friends with some people who were friends with the
sculptor, so you never knew who you were going to be in the room
with at any given time that you were at a party and felt the urge
to just start straight up making fun of the statue.

There are some appreciable differences between the student
bodies of Virginia Commonwealth University and the University of
Richmond. VCU students fell into several categories: heroin
users, meth users, people with multiple tattoos, people with
multiple piercings, people with multiple piercings that you didn’t
realize were there until you were in the middle of having sex with
them and discovered that you had all this shrapnel to navigate
around, and also some people who weren’t in the art school. By
contrast, students from the University of Richmond were basically
“like UVa. students, only dumb.”

The Ku Klux Klan’s number was in the White Pages! Is that
normal? I never noticed it in the White Pages of any other place
I’ve lived. And I haven’t checked any White Pages since. It was
more like one night I was like, “Damn, I bet the Klan’s phone
number is in this town’s phone book or something,” and lo, there it
was! It was just an answering machine, though. (A thoroughly
racist answering machine.) Me and Justice, my coworker at
the record store, would call and leave messages that graphically
depicted us in the middle of some “hardcore miscegenation.”

There are no left turns in Richmond. Or, at least there
were a surprising amount of streets in our neighborhood where they
were disallowed.

Also, all the prostitutes that you were likely to encounter
around VCU were cross-dressers. There were no exceptions to
this.

Both of those facts (the left turns, the crossdressers) were
immortalized in a song called “No Left Turns In Richmond” by my
friends’ band, but you probably never heard that song because their
other song was named “I Shot Michael Jordan’s Dad (And I’m Glad)”
and people just weren’t into that. Too soon.

We sometimes hung out with this dude named Ivo whose brother
was in Bio Ritmo.
Talking to him was just like talking to someone who had committed
himself to doing a lifelong, “Saturday Night Live”-style John
Travolta imitation. But he was cool, though. I’m pretty sure he
sold one of my friends a gun.

Someone once approached me about possibly “fiancee
swapping.” Except it was this middle-aged grad student who was
grey and sweaty and who didn’t have a fiancee, or a girlfriend
even, for that matter, to swap. Not that I would have done it if he
had, he was gross! And get this: he pitched this idea to me at the
Carpenter Center during the intermission of Kiss Of The Spider
Woman. I mean, of all the places!

VCU now plays basketball at a place called the Siegel
Center. It wasn’t there when I was a student. But it’s two
blocks from my old apartment, in a neighborhood that VCU long
coveted and finally overtook. Gone now is the terrible strip club
down the street from me, the decent comic book store and the
converted movie theatre where I saw the Jon Spencer Blues Explosion
leap around to the light of a single maddening strobe.

My friends Jessica and Sarah lived in a haunted house on
Grove Avenue. For realsies! This poltergeist was all up in
their shit, constantly!

My wife got fired from the Body Shop while we lived in
Richmond. The Body Shop! What do you have to do to get fired
from the Body Shop? (The story of how my wife got fired from the
Body Shop is really not that interesting actually.)

Here’s an interesting story. One night, while I was up
working on my thesis, I started hearing this strange, repeated
noise out my window, coming from the back alley. I went down the
back stairs and outside, and the noise became more clear: it
sounded like someone yelling some loud gibberish, followed by this
epically confident laughter, like, “Garbhlegharg bafulliblah.
[pause] HEH. HEH. HEH.” Over and over again. I walked out into the
alley, seeking to identify the source of the noise. I discovered
that it was emanating from the fifth floor of the retirement home
that backed onto the alley shared by my apartment. Upstairs, there
was some old codger in a grey t-shirt, with the window open, just
yelling out into the night, some drunken blather punctuated by this
cocksure HEH-HEH-HEHs. People all up and down the street were
howling at this guy to shut the hell up already, it was after two
in the morning and people were sleeping, etc. But he didn’t give a
shit. Those catcalls just fueled him further. And so he stood at
his window, pulling on a bottle, howling his nonsense into the
night, and letting everyone on the block know that tonight, he just
DID NOT GIVE A FUCK. For one night, he was going to forget the life
that passed him by, that had brought him to this ramshackle
retirement home, and just give the world outside his window a piece
of his goddamn mind until someone finally busted down the door and
stopped him. I stood out there in the alley for a few minutes more,
craning my neck to get a better view of the gaunt figure in the
window, raining down indecipherable epithets upon my poor,
broken-down Southern town. In a world of perfect honesty, that guy
would have a statue on Monument Avenue.

Jason Linkins‘
life
was saved by some truly great ER doctors and nurses at the
Medical College of Virginia, and he wishes them the best.